Freelance Pod

Sure, none of us have finished Bandersnatch yet, because none of us ever will. We're just going to have to live with that. One thing we'll all have noticed is that the themes of mental illness, therapy and medication are central to every path that Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) takes through the game-film. I speak to Dr Bishakha Chowdhury about how his fragile state compounds our feelings of guilt when choosing futures for Stefan that will only torture him further.

Netflix has finally released the trailer for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch! What's a Black Mirror Event? Nobody knows, but looks like we'll be finding out at about 8am GMT tomorrow...

To help with the Season 5 anticipation, here's an interview I did with Charlie Brooker in October, around the release of behind-the-scenes book Inside Black Mirror. No spoilers for Season 5, but you need to know your Seasons 1-4.

I've known this episode's guest a long time, since we were both undergraduates at Oxford back in the Noughties. Oli's made an impressive number of short films over the decade since graduating. He's also been made redundant three times (same as me!), so he's very well-placed to talk about the ups and downs of work in a digital age. Oli's latest project is making a short film with the BBC and BFI to celebrate 30 years of the internet, by looking at how gay men have met each over the years.

All the Brexit palaver has sent the political news cycle spinning faster than ever, but there's one politician who's having a gentle bit of fun with it: Ed Miliband. Aside from a lot of cheeky tweeting, he's got a successful weekly podcast called Reasons to be Cheerful. Producer Emma Corsham, pops onto Freelance Pod with the card to talk about how Theresa May might fare as a podcaster, the Geoffocracy and, inevitably, shark movies.

This week's guest is film critic Ryan Gilbey, who's a self-confessed "creature of print," as he started out on The Independent's film desk 24 years ago, after winning a competition. He now writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and New Statesman. Ryan has seen journalism shift from print to digital, and that's affected how filmmakers and actors approach interviews.

This episode's guest is radio and podcast producer Shola Aleje.

Shola works on Lauren Laverne's BBC 6 Music show, as well as producing podcasts for Emma Gannon, Cherry Healey and Bestival.

We recorded in Shola's London living room, which has a gorgeous vintage vibe, a shelving unit filled with vinyl and a large canvas print of Bruce Springsteen from around the turn of the century.

We talk about how radio was a way of connecting across time and space before the internet...

This week's guest is Jordan Gass-Poore', who's currently working for US liberal magazine Mother Jones in New York. Jordan grew up in Texas, and has worked as a journalist in her hometown, in New York and in London. She's also studied journalism in the US and UK. On the eve of the November 2018 US Midterms - an election that saw the biggest midterm voter turnout since 1914 - Jordan tells me how different journalism is in the UK and the US.

The first guest is audio expert Christina H Moore. Christina has worked on podcasts for the BBC and for Apple Podcasts, and she now works on podcasts with musicians. 

Christina's seen the inner workings of the world's most popular podcast discovery engine: the Apple Podcasts app. So her advice is invaluable for podcasters and would-be podcasters alike.

In other podcast-related things this week, the New Yorker ran a big piece on them - have you read it?

Freelance Pod is a new podcast all about how the internet has revolutionised the way we work. 

Hear some of the guests who will join host Suchandrika Chakrabarti on upcoming episodes, to talk about how the world of work has transformed from analogue to digital.